Jordan Westhoff's Blog

Tag Archives: admin utilities

In the past I’ve spent a bit of time talking about the merits of RAID and other high speed disk setups. Several years ago I also published posts about dual drive setups and did some surgery on my MacBook Pro in an effort to scrap the optical drive in favor of adding an SSD. (Psst, the old article is still available here)

All in all, the overall speed of a computer can be attributed to the combination of all of its internal parts working together to get more work done in less time. This is especially true of high performance machines, servers and drive array machines. While a wonderful utility, known as the BlackMagic Disk Speed Test, is available for Windows and OSX, it isn’t available for Linux. While I am sure there are a plethora of GUI disk speed utilities for Linux, there is one that I’m particularly drawn to, due to its simplicity and ease of use from the terminal. Since Linux is focused on being minimalist in the pursuit of performance, it only makes sense that installing a whole new utility just for spin testing is a bit wasteful.

As a result, I’ve written a basic script that does a pretty accurate disk speed test via the command line. The utility should work with all flavors of linux, I have been using it and deploying it across my fleet, all of which are either running Debian, ARCH or centOS 6.5.

The script is far from complex, merely taking a user input of how large a block of info to write to the disk and then it both writes and reads that size block of info and takes a time measurement. It is, however, pretty handy and works as fast as your drives can spin. Here, you can see the output of the script. I ran it with an argument of 2048MB across a single Western Digital VelociRaptop 15K RPM drive in one of my servers here in the rack.

Not too shabby for a single 15K drive!

The code isn’t proprietary, you are free to use it how you like as an easy sysAdmin tool and it is easily modified to work however you please. Enjoy!